Earlier quoted context omitted.
5) they were stolen
Which is the same as 2) and 3).
No, could have been stolen through bugs in their software (e.g. transaction maleability), not directly from stealing the keys
Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?
101–110 of 205 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?
#102In November of 2011 Mt. Gox demonstrated control of 500k BTC. I followed the 500,000 BTC for a bit beginning at https://blockchain.info/tx/b269bf1b82dae8a61f7f91dbf7a9d807e... . The coins move around and small amounts are sent away, but the majority ends up back in Mt. Gox's main (hot) wallet. This repeats a few times until the majority is paid back to the main Mt.Gox address. Here is the transaction where it starts…
I'm a bit new to bitcoins, but is it technically possible for the bitcoins community as a whole to make a blacklist of bitcoins addresses and "ban" the stolen bitcoins ? Such blacklist would daunt robbers and enforce public trust in bitcoins.
But what if I steal a Bitcoin and exchange it directly to USD. If the coin is banned later my counterparty, who acted in good faith, is left with an empty bag.
Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?
#103I have to go with the following answer: in someone's pocket.
A pocket of someone who had means, opportunity, and motive? Hmmm...
If you're thinking Mark Karpeles, he doesn't really have motive as he's likely going to go to jail.
However, an employee or contractor at mtgox who figured he could cover his tracks could have stolen them
Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?
#104In November of 2011 Mt. Gox demonstrated control of 500k BTC. I followed the 500,000 BTC for a bit beginning at https://blockchain.info/tx/b269bf1b82dae8a61f7f91dbf7a9d807e... . The coins move around and small amounts are sent away, but the majority ends up back in Mt. Gox's main (hot) wallet. This repeats a few times until the majority is paid back to the main Mt.Gox address. Here is the transaction where it starts…
It would be interesting to put these transactions, or the whole blockchain, in a graph database like Neo4J. Dealing with it as a graph would make it easier to find the sinks for all the transactions that started from that wallet. It would also be interesting to look at deviations from the historical statistical distribution in the aggregate of these transactions as a function of time, that would show when a single ac…
Visualising it in something like KeyLines (http://keylines.com/) would be awesome.
Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?
#105Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?
#106To reply to a recurring line of thought, Bitcoins are not atomic entities with serial numbers like dollar bills. You can't say "Bitcoin #AE472b was stolen" and then trace it through its life, or blacklist it. Instead Bitcoin is a ledger that details wallets and accounts. The origin of balances came from mining, and then people made transactions that, on the official ledger, transferred some or all of those amounts to…
Right, exactly. It just seems hopeless to try to figure out "where they are". They're drops of water in the ocean.
Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?
#107So if the bitcoins are seized by some government entity....wouldn't that make the total value of bitcoin go up? Supply and demand and all that... Again, I know very, very little about bitcoin or economics in general.
Bitcoins have no intrinsic value. They only have value in trade.
If I started my own currency called a superdollar, and I had the only superdollar in existence, it would be worthless, despite the fact that it was very rare.
If a foreign entity can make the bitcoins you have disappear, that leads to less confidence in your ability to use the bitcoins for trade. The fact that there's fewer out there doesn't mean yours are more valuable. The number of bitcoins has been constantly increasing, yet the price has been going steadily up as well. That's because they've become more trusted, more usable. More places will accept them in trade, and more exchanges exist.
When places like Mt. Gox fail, or fear that foreign entities have the ability to essentially rob the banks with impunity, it makes the currency less trusted.
Consider this. The government issues a currency called digibux. They are matched to the USD, you can buy one digibuck for 1 USD, but they are limited in volume, only so many are offered. Looking at this naively, digibux has the same value as USD. Now consider the following happens, the government takes down a giant drug operation, and invalidates all of the digibux that were involved in the operation. A friend of yours who was a pizza delivery guy has hundreds of dollars removed from his digital wallet because they were tips from people who had participated in the drug trade.
Now you're sitting with 10,000 digibux, and you know that the government is pleased with the results of the previous sting and wants to set up more operations like that. Someone offers you 8,000 USD for your 10,000 digibux. You know that the 8,000 USD can never just vanish.
The number of digibux in circulation went down. But did that make the total value of digibux go up?
Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?
#108What if Satoshi Nakamoto stole them?
Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?
#109So if the bitcoins are seized by some government entity....wouldn't that make the total value of bitcoin go up? Supply and demand and all that... Again, I know very, very little about bitcoin or economics in general.
> So if the bitcoins are seized by some government entity....wouldn't that make the total value of bitcoin go up? Supply and demand and all that...
You are only considering the supply side and assuming that the government seizing bitcoins from one of the major exchanges (and, subsequently, collapsing the exchange) doesn't impact the perceived viability of the bitcoin ecosystem (since, presumably, the same thing could happen elsewhere) and reduce the demand for bitcoins as well as the supply.
Also, it further assumes, on the supply side, that the government simply throws the coins in, effectively, a digital landfill -- otherwise, the fact that they were forcibly transferred from the exchange to the government doesn't actually have any effect on supply.
Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bingo. The Feds seized their cold wallet somehow. Mark has said repeatedly that Mt. Gox is under investigation and that he can't talk about it. There's a supposed IRC log from two days ago where he let it slip that he's under a gag order, saying two days ago "le gouv US ne veut pas qu'on disclose" (the US gov. doesn't want us to say anything)[0]. And he's said in public that he can't discuss the matter since he's und…
fyi. A US gagging order has no legal power over a Frenchman in Japan.
It wouldn't even have to be a judicial order. The FBI or Treasury Department agent could just tell him something like "keep quiet about this or you're looking at 10 years in a federal prison". This is how prosecutors work here in the U.S., and Mark is under investigation by the U.S. government.
I don't believe this is right, but this is the reality.
I can't believe people think this is some kind of conspiracy theory. Mt. Gox has already had 5 million confiscated by the U.S., last year: http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/23/feds-seize-another-2-1-mill...
Why is it so unlikely that they seized more money, probably in the form of paper wallets from a safety deposit box? Japan law enforcement works closely with the U.S.
But here's what they really wanted from Mark, and I wonder if they got them: all the Mt. Gox account records, including IP logs and bank account numbers.